Over a century before Timothy Leary told a generation of young people to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” a conservative Anglican beat him to the punch, sparking a tide of self-idealization, impiety and riotous psychedelic expression that became known as “addition literature.”
Would Thomas De Quincey have recognized himself as its instigator?
The book that made it happen was his 1821 Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater, which made De Quincey an overnight sensation. But as if sensing his title as literature’s reigning hophead might be in jeopardy, he later produced a sequel nearly as famous: Suspiria de Profundis.
Right off the bat, in an introductory note, the author makes clear his use of laudanum is not something he takes lightly. For him it is a tool with which to “dream magnificently.”
He presents this in the form of a bold and worthy challenge:
The machinery for dreaming planted in the human brain was not planted for nothing. That faculty, in alliance with the mystery of darkness, is the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy. And the dreaming organ, in connection with the heart, the eye, and the ear, composes the magnificent apparatus which forces the infinite into the chambers of a human brain, and throws dark reflections from eternities below all life upon the mirrors of the sleeping mind.
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| The use of opium was legal in De Quincey's day, but hardly considered British, associated with Chinese and Turkish people. An image from the 19th century from https://www.posterazzi.com/opium-smoking-in-china-in-the-19th-century-after-a-19th-century-photograph-from-customs-of-the-world-published-c-1913-poster-print-by-ken-welsh-design-pics-item-vardpi12310741/ |
Lest you worry for De Quincey’s sanity with these experiments of his, he assures you kicking the drug habit is nothing. Why he has already kicked it twice, “and by efforts even more prodigious in the second of these cases than in the first.” Sure it’s a monkey on his back, but he can kick it anytime he wants. Honest.
I picked up Suspiria de Profundis a complete outsider to De Quincey, expecting something unique. This I got, but not in a way that brought me pleasure or made any sense. It’s not that its druggy, per se, as the chemical aspect of De Quincey’s experiences, while no doubt present, are hardly emphasized during most of the book.
Instead he really wants to talk about his painful boyhood, about two sisters lost at a young age, and the burden of going through youth so much smarter than anyone else. He explains all this by relating a series of personal experiences. His recall of them may have been intensified by narcotics, but the descriptions are lucid enough. Fiendishly overwritten much of the time, yes, but lucid:
Rapture of grief, that, being too mighty for a child to sustain, foundest a happy oblivion in a heaven-born sleep, and within that sleep didst conceal a dream, whose meanings in after years, when solely I deciphered, suddenly there flashed upon me new light; and even by the grief of a child, as I will show you reader hereafter, were confounded the falsehoods of philosophers.
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| De Quincey relates his childhood as one of joy mixed with early tragedy and knowledge that would sustain him for years to come. "Where the situation is favourable as to solitude and genial feelings, children have a specific power for contemplating the truth," he writes in Suspiria de Profundis. Ludwig Knauss engraving from https://www.kcmgalleries.com/auction-lot/framed-1800s-ludwig-knauss-engraving-young-childr_1DB48C699F |
That archaic verb tense you see in words like “foundest” and “didst” occurs often in Suspiria de Profundis, as if De Quincey was channeling his inner Milton. I have seen the writings within Suspiria de Profundis described as “prose poems,” which sounds too fancy for what they are, a swirling, an endless, lyrical succession of sidestepping around themes.
A section titled “The Palimpsest,” for example, begins with a lengthy explanation of what the word “Palimpsest” means. But before that goes anywhere, it becomes a soliloquy on the need to explain Greek ideas already well known to men to his female readers. Then he explains how most people misunderstand why palimpsests even came into being, because what they know about the origins of printing is wrong.
De Quincey displays himself time and again as an incurable know-it-all.
He does get to a point, that no palimpsest is like that of the human brain. It is a great point; just a shame it took him so long to offer it:
Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious handwritings of grief or joy which have inscribed themselves successively upon the palimpsest of your brain; and, like the annual leaves of aboriginal forests, or the undissolving snows on the Himalaya, or light falling upon light, the endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness. But by the hour of death, but by fever, but by the searchings of opium, all these can revive in strength. They are not dead, but sleeping.
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| Thomas De Quincey, as painted in 1846 by John Watson Gordon. He wrote for Blackwell's Magazine and was prized for his writing in the fields of economics and Shakespeare, among other topics. It is an open question whether drug use helped or hindered his writing. Image from https://www.the-tls.com/literature-by-region/british-literature/thomas-de-quincey-selected-writings-book-review |
Say what you will of the chore of reading this book, paragraphs like this make it seem worth doing. Now if only De Quincey had made this the first and not the last graph of his “Palimpsest” essay, going on to explain how he unlocked these buried experiences using laudanum. It might have been an essay worth reading, whether a skeptical reader or not.
The rest of the book is a series of essays around the elusiveness of time, with tacit references to drug-taking in the hallucinogenic qualities of what he describes. In “The Apparition of the Brocken” we visit a German mountain where a pagan apparition bows in supplication to the Christian God. In “Savannah-la-Mar” he floats over the sunken ruins of a West Indian city, where “pendulous bells” toll no more.
The most famous essay, “Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow,” posits the idea of three supernatural female entities which feed off human misery in different ways. The essay centers on a younger De Quincey’s recollections of suffering at their hands:
Madonna [Our Lady of Tears] moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with incalculable motions, bounding, and with a tiger’s leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater Tenebrarum.
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| The three Ladies of Sorrow as described in "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow," as painted by Zakuro Aoyama for a recital album cover. De Quincey writes: "Three sisters they are, of one mysterious household; and their paths are wide apart, but of their dominion there is no end." Image from https://cadabra-records.fandom.com/wiki/Suspiria_De_Profundis:_Levana_and_Our_Ladies_of_Sorrow_(LP) |
Suspiria was the title of a 1977 horror film directed by Dario Argento which used this essay not only for its inspiration, but for that of two later Argento movies, one for each Lady. Watching the film Suspiria, it is hard getting that connection. Psychotic as that movie is, it has a definite structure and clarity missing here.
I have come across two versions of Suspiria de Profundis, an 87-page version from Dover Thrift Editions and an online version that is much longer, packed with additional essays. As De Quincey wrote for periodicals, it seems he never settled on a single authorized version.
What exists is less a sequel detailing the effects of laudanum on an imaginative mind, and more a loose collection of memoirs written around themes of childhood regret and the shock of first discovering oneself “in a world of evil and strife” and the struggle to overcome it:
Deep is the solitude in life of millions upon millions who, with hearts swelling forth love, have none to love them. Deep is the solitude of those who, with secret griefs, have none to pity them. Deep is the solitude of those who, fighting with doubts or darkness, have none to counsel them.
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| Over the course of De Quincey's life, and long after it, Suspiria de Profundis saw publication in several forms, with no authoritative complete edition ever emerging. He kept adding material until his death, and planned to add still more. The title means "Sighs from the depths." Image from https://absoluteknave.squarespace.com/blog/2017/9/4/suspiria-de-profundis-1845-thomas-de-quincey |
To get back to that initial question I had, about whether De Quincey would have recognized the title “Father of Addition Literature,” it is clear from the very personal glimpses we get of his character and self-image that the answer is clearly no. He was a firm believer in “profound religion” and a pastoral sentimentalist whatever his night moods.
The
problem De Quincey faces with today’s reader is less about drug taking, which
Western culture is far more accepting of now than in the 1800s, and more with his
prose style. His geyser-like verbosity is matched by a need to showcase vast
learning by throwing up classical allusions that often get in the way of
whatever point it is trying to make. A modern reader will have trouble less
with De Quincey’s message of mind liberation, and more with the excessive way
he delivers it.
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